The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of information that needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without losing data, which means that what will be deleted throughout the compression will be either redundant data or unneeded one. When the data is uncompressed later on, in the first case the info and its quality shall be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You will find different compression algorithms that are more efficient for various kind of information. Compressing and uncompressing data normally takes a lot of processing time, therefore the server performing the action must have enough resources to be able to process your data fast enough. One simple example how information can be compressed is to store just how many consecutive positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code rather than storing the actual 1s and 0s.
Data Compression in Shared Web Hosting
The compression algorithm used by the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform is named LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any website hosted in a shared web hosting account with us since not only does it compress info more efficiently than algorithms used by various file systems, but also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a great deal of CPU processing time, which is not a problem for our platform for the reason that it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to make backup copies at a higher speed and on less disk space, so we can have a couple of daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't affect the performance of the servers. That way, we could always restore all content that you may have removed by mistake.